Drink that up, it's good for you
Nov. 27th, 2022 02:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I'm slowly recovering from my cold, helped by all my usual tricks: Burmese noodle soup with tamarind and lime, hot lemon, honey and ginger drink, sipped in front of the wood-burning stove, rest with books under the weighted blanket. I felt horrendous when I woke up this morning, but that seems to have gone away and my head feels clear.
I even managed to write nearly 1000 words of a Yuletide treat this morning! At the moment I have ideas for another two treats, one of which is almost certainly unlikely to hit the lower word count threshold for the main collection (and so will go in Madness), the other of which I will write only if I have time. So it's certainly an improvement on last year, where I managed only my assignment, but I'm doubtful I'll hit the heights of inspiration I reached for several years running where I wrote four or five fics per exchange. In any case, I'm pleased with this treat, and the words flowed faster than I expected.
I've finished two books this weekend, both of which were, in their way, about family, and its complicated, thorny web of expectation and obligation.
The first was The Red Scholar's Wake (Aliette de Bodard), which I've mentioned several times already. It's the latest in her Vietnamese-inspired spacefaring Xuya universe, and this novel involves a marriage of convenience between a sentient spaceship pirate leader, and a captive engineer who has certain technical skills of great use to the pirates. Various political tensions among the pirates, and across the galaxy more generally, must be navigated, and as with most of Aliette's fiction, there's a strong emphasis on the restoration of justice, motherhood, trauma recovery, and finding love and connection in the ruins of past relationships. There's also a lot of tea-making nerdery, and loving descriptions of Vietnamese food!
The second book was Not Good For Maidens (Tori Bovalino), a YA retelling of Christina Rosetti's 'Goblin Market' that ended up being perfect for the gloomy, stormy weather. It reminded me a bit of Sarah Rees Brennan's Demon's Lexicon trilogy — books set in a slantwise version of England where magic presses up against the everyday world, in which certain families fight an endless supernatural battle, and in which a tangled web of lies and family secrets finally become revealed, causing hurt and chaos. Unlike Rees Brennan's trilogy, however, there's no humour and wisecracking — Bovalino's characters don't wield words as a shield and a weapon. It was an interesting choice to make one of the two point-of-view characters asexual, given the book's inspiration, although I wish Bovalino had made more of that — I feel that this should either have meant that the goblin market held no allure for this character, or that it tempted her more explicitly with desires that weren't sexual.
I'll close things off with a few links that have crossed my path on Dreamwidth over the past few days.
vriddy has gathered together a great batch of links relating to social media platforms and our relationships with them.
Viafirecat, a New Yorker interview with Rian Johnson. (The New Yorker sets limits on how many articles you can read per month without a subscription, so it may ask for a login or payment if you have read multiple New Yorker articles already this month.) Johnson has long been one of my favourite Hollywood writer-directors — The Last Jedi was by far and away my favourite of the recent Star Wars sequel trilogy films (and it's probably my second-favourite contemporary Star Wars media after Andor), his pastiche films (high school film noir Brick, and cosy mystery Knives Out) are great fun, I'm looking forward to Glass Onion, and even his films that don't really work for me are interesting failures (Looper).
I don't know how many people for whom this is of interest, but if you sign up for Holly Black's newsletter, you get bonus Folk of the Air material — a PDF of letters from Cardan to Jude during the time she was exiled from Faerie.
I decided at last to sign up for![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomtrees, and I'll be sure to share my sign-up once the mod has approved it. I'm now going to spend the next couple of hours poking around other people's sign-ups and seeing if there is anything I can fill. All in all, I've had a surprisingly productive weekend!
I even managed to write nearly 1000 words of a Yuletide treat this morning! At the moment I have ideas for another two treats, one of which is almost certainly unlikely to hit the lower word count threshold for the main collection (and so will go in Madness), the other of which I will write only if I have time. So it's certainly an improvement on last year, where I managed only my assignment, but I'm doubtful I'll hit the heights of inspiration I reached for several years running where I wrote four or five fics per exchange. In any case, I'm pleased with this treat, and the words flowed faster than I expected.
I've finished two books this weekend, both of which were, in their way, about family, and its complicated, thorny web of expectation and obligation.
The first was The Red Scholar's Wake (Aliette de Bodard), which I've mentioned several times already. It's the latest in her Vietnamese-inspired spacefaring Xuya universe, and this novel involves a marriage of convenience between a sentient spaceship pirate leader, and a captive engineer who has certain technical skills of great use to the pirates. Various political tensions among the pirates, and across the galaxy more generally, must be navigated, and as with most of Aliette's fiction, there's a strong emphasis on the restoration of justice, motherhood, trauma recovery, and finding love and connection in the ruins of past relationships. There's also a lot of tea-making nerdery, and loving descriptions of Vietnamese food!
The second book was Not Good For Maidens (Tori Bovalino), a YA retelling of Christina Rosetti's 'Goblin Market' that ended up being perfect for the gloomy, stormy weather. It reminded me a bit of Sarah Rees Brennan's Demon's Lexicon trilogy — books set in a slantwise version of England where magic presses up against the everyday world, in which certain families fight an endless supernatural battle, and in which a tangled web of lies and family secrets finally become revealed, causing hurt and chaos. Unlike Rees Brennan's trilogy, however, there's no humour and wisecracking — Bovalino's characters don't wield words as a shield and a weapon. It was an interesting choice to make one of the two point-of-view characters asexual, given the book's inspiration, although I wish Bovalino had made more of that — I feel that this should either have meant that the goblin market held no allure for this character, or that it tempted her more explicitly with desires that weren't sexual.
I'll close things off with a few links that have crossed my path on Dreamwidth over the past few days.
vriddy has gathered together a great batch of links relating to social media platforms and our relationships with them. Via
firecat, a New Yorker interview with Rian Johnson. (The New Yorker sets limits on how many articles you can read per month without a subscription, so it may ask for a login or payment if you have read multiple New Yorker articles already this month.) Johnson has long been one of my favourite Hollywood writer-directors — The Last Jedi was by far and away my favourite of the recent Star Wars sequel trilogy films (and it's probably my second-favourite contemporary Star Wars media after Andor), his pastiche films (high school film noir Brick, and cosy mystery Knives Out) are great fun, I'm looking forward to Glass Onion, and even his films that don't really work for me are interesting failures (Looper).I don't know how many people for whom this is of interest, but if you sign up for Holly Black's newsletter, you get bonus Folk of the Air material — a PDF of letters from Cardan to Jude during the time she was exiled from Faerie.
I decided at last to sign up for
fandomtrees, and I'll be sure to share my sign-up once the mod has approved it. I'm now going to spend the next couple of hours poking around other people's sign-ups and seeing if there is anything I can fill. All in all, I've had a surprisingly productive weekend!
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Date: 2022-11-27 07:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-27 07:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-27 07:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-27 07:38 pm (UTC)Some of the criticisms of TLJ are possibly warranted, but I always find myself feeling really defensive of it, because I feel that at least it was an attempt to do something other than reheated nostalgia. I mean, nostalgia is fine — TFA is unalloyed nostalgia, but it also has a wonderful sense of adventure and wonder, and I enjoyed it when I saw it in the cinema. (For me TLJ works, but I feel that even if it didn't work for someone else, they should at least be able to recognise it as an interesting failure.) I try to avoid contributing to an environment in which people passionately praise their favourite media by violently denouncing media they dislike, but I have to admit that I find Jeannette Ng's emotional review of TLJ (which does just that) to be extremely satisfying to read.
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Date: 2022-11-27 07:55 pm (UTC)God, that was TERRIBLE. Poor Kelly Tran! She was such a big fan, and she was like a fan representative in the movie too. And then she was barely in the finale. Grr.
Some of the criticisms of TLJ are possibly warranted, but I always find myself feeling really defensive of it
OMFG, me too. I really loved a lot of the themes in it -- especially about not giving up, keeping on going, what it means to be 'nobody' -- and for Godsakes, it is just NOT THAT BAD. Which might sound like faint praise, since I really do love it, but it's like every single review of Andor I read (we also loved Andor) went out of its way to shit on the sequels and TLJ in particular. I liked TROS okay, but it was a hot mess and often felt manufactured (let's not even talk about Oscar Isaac walking through it). I saw a lot of press beforehand about how Hamill and Ridley supposedly were upset at their parts, and it was like fans took it and ran with it and NEVER LET THAT GO. It was nuts! I have seen many terrible scifi movies, because T is a scifi nut, and all these people going on about how HORRIBLY UNWATCHABLE TLJ is just makes me think they haven't seen very many scifi movies, lol.
I have to admit that I find Jeannette Ng's emotional review of TLJ (which does just that) to be extremely satisfying to read.
Oooh THANK YOU, I love her writing and haven't seen that.
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Date: 2022-11-27 08:10 pm (UTC)There is a call to arms in The Last Jedi that goes unanswered by an apathetic galaxy. It is part of the film’s parable about failure, about how to cling on to hope in dark times, about how we win not just by lashing out at those we hate, but saving those that we love. The film was full of these beautifully wise, beautifully phrased sentiments that were baked into its story. They are sentiments that I have returned to time and again in the bleak three years since I first heard them. They were timely, to say the least.
That was why the film felt really personally important to me when I first saw it -- and still does.
This was also a really good take on the backlash I saw at the time: https://bittergertrude.com/2018/01/04/why-so-many-men-hate-the-last-jedi-but-cant-agree-on-why/
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Date: 2022-11-27 08:24 pm (UTC)Thanks for sharing that link — it really sums up the backlash well. God, whining fanboys outraged when things are not about them are so, so tiresome.
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Date: 2022-11-27 08:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-27 08:48 pm (UTC)And yes, I agree entirely re: fanboy backlash.
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Date: 2022-11-28 02:34 am (UTC)We retell old stories and breathe new life into tropes not because they are familiar, but to create new meaning. Stories have this wonderful capacity to inspire us, to show us humanity, to connect us and the symbols within them are not just there to be recognised, something cool that we remember loving from our childhood. They have value, they are anchored with memories, with meaning.
And we can tell our own stories! (Like I firmly believe Poe and Finn are waiting in that ship for Rey and after she says bye to her chosen Force Parents she goes off to have adventures with them.)
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Date: 2022-11-28 08:04 am (UTC)I firmly believe that too :D
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Date: 2022-11-27 09:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-28 07:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-27 09:26 pm (UTC)Count me in as another Last Jedi (and Rian Johnson) appreciator. I thought it at least tried to do something different and is the only one of the sequel trilogy films that holds up on rewatch for me.
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Date: 2022-11-28 02:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-28 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-28 08:00 pm (UTC)I'm finding it really pleasing how this post seems to have drawn all the Last Jedi and Rian Johnson fans out of the woodwork!
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Date: 2022-11-28 09:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-28 04:25 am (UTC)Hope you feel like new soon :)
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Date: 2022-11-28 08:01 pm (UTC)Thanks for the well wishes — I'm definitely feeling almost completely better today.
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Date: 2022-11-28 04:26 am (UTC)Glad also that you are on the mend.
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Date: 2022-11-28 08:02 pm (UTC)Thanks also for the well wishes.
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Date: 2022-11-28 04:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-28 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-28 11:40 pm (UTC)(Also the scene with REAL YODA. I remember in an interview Johnson? said they were doing that scene at night, a couple of times, with just the fire and the actors, and he looked behind him and suddenly realized there were all these people behind them, standing in absolute silence, watching Luke and Yoda again, enthralled.)
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Date: 2022-11-28 07:21 am (UTC)Rian Johnson is one of those directors I'm always interested in seeing, because just as you said, even when he misses it's an interesting failure.
Very nice to stumble into a whole comments section of TLJ appreciation btw *g*
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Date: 2022-11-28 08:08 pm (UTC)Thanks also for your well wishes — I'm definitely feeling a lot better today.
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Date: 2022-11-28 11:11 am (UTC)Knives Out was a lot of fun. Also looking forward to Glass Onion!
Not Good For Maidens is on my TBR, so thanks for the review.
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Date: 2022-11-28 08:12 pm (UTC)I'm glad you liked the sound of Not Good For Maidens — it's pretty good.
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Date: 2022-11-28 11:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-30 07:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-29 06:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-30 07:48 pm (UTC)